Tag Archives: Corn

The story this book tells has been imitated enough that I knew exactly where we were heading. Like Deathstalker, I’ve seen it all before and could shake my eighties haircut with hubris at it (if I had an eighties haircut). And really, the problem of the main character is hubris. He thinks he’s smart enough to figure out what’s really going on in Cornwall Coombe and stamp out those “old ways” he keeps hearing about. He thinks. He’s no rural sexpot postmaster, or frustrated outsider who should really go to college, and he’s certainly no blind elderly neighbor who just goes with the flow. No, he’s Ned, incredibly pompous narrator, so he goes forth into the corn-based fray (watch out though, corn will sneak up on you when you least expect it), with all the self-righteousness and obsession he can muster.

Finny, you don’t want to cross the Widow Peregrine when she’s looking up at you like that. Don’t get sassy.

Much has already been said about this book, much. “ALL THE THINGS” have already been said. I too enjoyed Allie Brosh’s blog once it was pointed out to me by my friend David and I very much enjoyed reading the book and of course, as I also have depression that gets pretty serious on occasion (like lately, whee! By the way, “SPRING BREAK!” is my new shorthand cry for help/asking that you please understand that I do not feel good and I would like assistance with potentially slight cheering so I know I should stick around) this book means a lot to me. I’ve found that one of the things I consistently heard about it and the blog posts is that it helps people who don’t have depression understand how depressed people feel – and that’s true. It’s not like one of those miracle “As Seen on TV” things, it really does do that. So if you want someone to understand your depression better, it is a good idea to read the depression parts (make sure you relate, it’s possible you won’t) and hand the book to the person you want to understand and ask them to read the part about the corn nibblet under the fridge. (Side note, why is Word trying to underline “nibblet” like I don’t know how to spell corn words? Suck it, Word. Oh, that’s a fragment, huh? Whatever.)

I would like to entrust all you gentle and not-so-gentle readers with my own recent version of the corn under the fridge story, it’s going to be less skillfully told and it involves a clown and Sean O’Neal. I am a writer and people have purchased my works, I’m sure you can tell based on how well I am telling the story I told you I was going to tell you. Moving on, I am regularly on my own, a solitary woman who does like Neil Diamond, so, it’s easy for me to stay in my depressive states when they suddenly smack me in the head and say, “Don’t enjoy anything. … Keep not enjoying anything. … No one’s coming to ask you if you’d like to enjoy anything ever again, so, holding pattern.” Sometimes though, sometimes, I can find something to break me back out on my own instead of having to rely entirely upon my guinea pigs. On more than one occasion, that something has been an article by Sean O’Neal of The A.V. Club, who apparently also has depression. Ugh, I’m still doing a terrible job getting to the part that matters… Anyway, one time in the recent past, I guess it was July now that I looked up the article , it was a dark and stormy night in the middle of the afternoon and I was looking for reasons to keep my chin up on the internet. Normally a terrible idea. I stumbled across a Newswire article about the new version of Stephen King’s It with a droll title. I started reading, unphased even by the prospect of a scary clown picture and just past multiple paragraphs of graciously deployed O’Neal snark and a terrifying clown illustration was this sentence: “Plump, kissable clown lips—oh so kissable.” and I could not stop laughing. I nearly fell off my couch and found the will to live again. Anti-climactic. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Allie. Thank you for putting up with that, Gentle Reader. Goodbye, most of my ability to tell a decent story using words.

Apparently Robert E. Howard wrote some non-Conan stories and this is one of them, as adapted into a graphic novel with a new ending and some twists and turns by master of Hap and Leonard Joe R. Lansdale with inkster Nathan Fox and colorist Dave Stewart.

It’s one of those tales where there’s an abandoned New Orleans mansion and the theoretically long-lost heirs to the people that owned it and dissolved under their own mythology return to find it in ruins and possibly now taken up by the occasional startling feral cat, an angry homeless person or two – possibly a gang – and, especially in this case, the super-scary fluttering birdies. Then the heir-apparents have to navigate a curse in order to claim what is theirs or die under the weight of it. Just like in Candyman II: Farewell to the Flesh, one of my all-time favorite sequels. This time, instead of antiques dealers and Tony Todd being all cool and murdering people who were ashamed of their family lineage, there are pigeons, flesh ripping (well, I guess that’s kind of the same, but no bees), a trek through the swamp to the owner of a bottletree to learn the real story of why their house is killing hippies. And there’s corn! It’s not very nice corn, but it’s corn.

Ozymandias does not wish to hear about any long-lost inheritances. Leave that to the Mississippi pigs, he’s an Illinois boy all the way.